RAISING ENGINEERING STUDENTS' AWARENESS ABOUT THE USEFULNESS OF E-LEARNING BASED LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES
RAISING ENGINEERING STUDENTS' AWARENESS ABOUT THE USEFULNESS OF E-LEARNING BASED LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES

Summary/Abstract: The curriculum for tertiary education engineering students has continuously been put under the pressure of time constraints versus high efficiency to be reached. This situation has strongly impacted the decisions taken by university teachers, including foreign language ones, as regards establishing priorities and designing optimal time and approach framework paradigms for the various components of the course they deliver. Consequently, one of the teacher’s roles in ensuring both quality and efficiency of the instructional process is that of enlarging the students’ repertory of language learning and using strategies meant to increase the learners’ possibility to study the foreign language, both in class, but also outside it - in their post-course activity of study and work, in an effective autonomous manner. In the current period, strategy training is in fact much facilitated by the variety of e-learning means and tools available, particularly in the case of engineering students, whose computer literacy and level of comfort in using such technology are far higher than those of other categories of learners. The aim of the paper is, therefore, to propose an approach to the teaching of English as a foreign language that should embed, as one of its main objectives, a coherent way of raising the trainees’ awareness of the most useful e-learning based language learning and using strategies. A presentation of the activities proposed and implemented in the concrete educational setting - a technical university in Romania – is provided, together with the rationale and pedagogical support underlying their design and use in the language class.

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